College raided in bogus students investigation

Immigration officials who raided a suspected bogus college found just two
foreign students when almost 140 should have been in classes.

The Home Office whistleblower says the 'highly trusted' status for colleges is too easy to abusePhoto: The Image Factory / Alamy

By Wesley Johnson, Home Affairs Correspondent

6:22PM GMT 04 Dec 2012

Ten staff at Leeds Professional College in West Yorkshire were held amid suspicions the college was charging thousands of pounds for admission into the UK for migrants who would either work illegally or disappear into the system, the UK Border Agency said.

Enforcement teams will now try to trace all 350 students registered with the college, most of whom were from Pakistan, and remove anyone in the country illegally.

Adrian Watkins, of the agency’s criminal and financial investigation team, said: “There should have been 138 students in class when we attended the premises. There were, in fact, just two students and they weren't actually studying.”

The "long-term plan" is that students who have not attended the college will be rounded up by enforcement teams and "dealt with accordingly", he added.

The arrests of eight Pakistani men and a British man and woman came as the borders watchdog warned that bogus students, missing migrants, and a backlog of hundreds of thousands of asylum and migration cases were leading to a lack of public confidence in the beleaguered Border Agency.

The agency is failing to get the basics right and is in such a mess that it does not even know what each of its separate sections is doing, John Vine, the independent chief inspector of borders and immigration, said.

It comes after two damning reports last month found the agency made virtually no effort to trace more than 120,000 asylum seekers and migrants, despite incorrectly reassuring MPs that “extensive checks” were regularly being carried out.

The agency also ignored more than 150,000 warnings in three years from universities and colleges concerned that their foreign students were bogus.

Mr Vine said: “I think there probably is a lack of public confidence and I think what needs to happen is some of the basics need to be got right more often.”

In 2006, John Reid, home secretary at the time, said the Home Office immigration department was “not fit for purpose” and asked by MPs if that was still the case, Mr Vine said: “I was disappointed not to find the progress I expected to see.”

Questioned over whether there was a “culture of withholding information”, he added: “I feel there’s a lack of transparency.”

He went on: “It strikes me that we are still coming across examples of backlogs across a whole range of the Border Agency’s work.”

Some 2,000 cases were put in an archive of applications from migrants who were apparently untraceable, despite the fact they were regularly reporting to the agency’s own centres immediately beforehand, Mr Vine said.

“I was shocked to find some of the things that I did on the asylum and legacy cases because that has been in the public domain for such a long time,” he added.

A Home Office spokesman said the agency was “a troubled organisation with a poor record of delivery".

“Turning the agency around will take time, but we are making progress,” he added.